Credit card products (e.g., credit cards) are well known and have significantly changed the way in which financial transactions are conducted. Credit cards are typically offered and provided to customers through credit card issuers, such as retail corporations, banks, financial institutions, or other companies that administer “private label” credit cards on behalf of their mercantile clients (hereinafter, for convenience, “credit card companies”). With a credit card, a customer can purchase goods and services without an immediate and direct exchange of currency. As is well known, the total amount of funds available to the customer for making purchases is typically limited to a specific amount predetermined by the issuer of the card, typically referred to as the “credit limit” of the credit card.
The process of obtaining credit, more specifically a credit card, has been largely manual. Typically, an applicant fills out a credit application by hand, and then submits the application by mail. The customer is typically required to provide an assortment of information, such as social security number, address, income, phone number(s), other credit cards held, other loans or debts, etc. (hereinafter “credit assessment information”), which is then assessed by the credit issuer to decide whether, and to what extent (e.g., what credit limit), credit should be offered to the customer. An integral part of this assessment is the procurement and review of the customer's credit report or credit score as issued by a credit bureau such as EQUIFAX, TRANSUNION, or EXPERIAN, or other credit clearing houses (hereinafter “credit bureaus”). After such a review by the credit issuer, and if favorable, a credit card may then be mailed to the customer within some period of time, e.g., ten days.
The manual nature of the credit assessment of a particular customer, and issuance of credit to that customer, is especially problematic when a customer attempts to procure credit at a point-of-sale (POS). For instance, a customer may wish to purchase clothes at a store (e.g., VICTORIA'S SECRET), and may wish at that time to simultaneously procure a VICTORIA'S SECRET credit card to pay for the immediate and future purchases. This requires a sales clerk of the store to relate relevant credit assessment information concerning the customer to the credit card company that administers the store's credit card program (or other similarly functioning division within the store) to assess the customer's credit. This has been accomplished in a number of different ways. In one prior art technique, the sales clerk can call the store's credit card company, and verbally relate the credit assessment information about the customer by phone. (Using this technique, it may first be necessary for the customer to write down such information, e.g., on a form similar in nature to a standard mail-in credit card application.). The credit card company representative can then, perhaps off line from the store clerk, contact a credit bureau (either electronically or by phone) to pull up the customer's credit report or score. After assessment of this information, the credit card company representative could then reconnect with the sales clerk, or call the clerk back, and verbally relate necessary information about the credit request to the clerk. For example, the credit card company representative might verbally tell the store clerk that the credit has been approved, that the credit limit is $ X, and what the customer's new account number is. The sales clerk could then write that information down on a temporary paper credit card, usable with a customer's identification card, which will eventually be replaced by a true plastic credit card to be mailed to the customer's home address some days later. In the background, the credit card company representative performs the necessary steps to electronically open the customer's account, establish billing procedures, etc. This technique, however, is not beneficial to the establishment of customer credit, as it may take five to ten minutes to complete. This is generally an unsuitable length of time for the customer to be “waiting around” at the point of sale, as the customer would like to be in and out of the store with his purchase and credit card as quickly as possible. Moreover, this procedure takes up the time of the sales clerk, whose time would be better spent serving other customers who might be waiting in line with their purchases. “Faxing” the request and results by using such a technique might reduce this wait time to some extent, but not significantly so.
To reduce the length of time needed to run this credit assessment/issuance process at a point of sale, attempts have been made to further electronically automate the process. For example, in prior techniques, credit card companies have equipped their mercantile clients with certain hardware or software modifications to more quickly interface with the credit card company. In one embodiment of this modification, a store is equipped with a computing device capable of electronically interfacing with the credit card company. Such equipment might have a key pad by which credit assessment information about the customer can be entered, or might have a credit card “swipe” device capable of reading the magnetic stripe or an existing credit card or other card held by the customer to provide such information. Such a computing device can exist as a stand alone device, or may be incorporated into, or connected to, the point of sale terminal, likely requiring some modification to the software which runs the terminal. Thus, these prior art techniques require hardware and/or software modifications to be made at the point of sale, and therefore are expensive and not optimal.
More complicated solutions exist. For example, credit information can be procured from a credit bureau “on-line,” e.g., through the internet, if the point of sale terminal is capable of connecting to the internet. But this removes the private label company from the loop, who cannot as part of the process, for example, electronically establish a customer account. Additionally, internet applications such as “screen scraping” and “web data mining” are usable by sales clerks to try and extract relevant credit assessment data for a given customer. (One such exemplary program is vTag™, marketed by Connotate Technologies). However, these technologies are difficult to run and interpret and prone to erroneous or complicated results requiring significant levels of assessment, thus defeating the goal of expediting the process.
These prior art methods for assessing and issuing credit are slow, frustrating, or expensive to implement. In view of the foregoing, there remains a need for an improved system and method for quickly providing credit while minimizing the risk to credit card issuers. It is envisioned that the present invention provides such a solution.